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I Shall Sign as Loui

Rhea Galanaki

As one of the most distinct voices in contemporary Greek literature, Rhea Galanaki vividly reconstructs her country's past by remembering the life of Andreas Rigopoulos, a nineteenth-century poet-revolutionary. This new translation brings to life this novel of exquisite lyricism and profound pain about a Greek intellectual's burden: to be Greek is to feel always responsible for the country's political existence and history.

About the Author

Rhea Galanaki is considered Greece's premier woman novelist. Born in Crete in 1947, Galanaki studied history and archaeology at the University of Athens and was a founding member of the Society of Greek Writers. She is the author of several books of poetry and criticism as well as two other novels, The Life of Ismail Ferik Pasha (P. Owen, 1996), which was the first Greek novel ever included in the 1994 UNESCO Collection of Representative Works. In 1999, Eleni, or Nobody won the Greek State Prize for Best Novel, and was one of the three candidates for the European Aristeion Prize for Literature. Galanaki lives in Patras, Greece.

Helen Dendrinou Kolias is a senior lecturer in the Department of Classics at Cornell University. She has translated the autobiography of Elisavet Moutzan-Martinengou.

Reviews

"Very much like Toni Morrison's Beloved, I Shall Sign as Loui is a poetic journey through memory and loss, in the sense that the central character, a writer, has to explore his people's history and carve his own place in it."